Product Update: BatchBook gets a facelift

• Posted October 2nd, 2008
• By Adam Darowski (bio)
• Filed under: Product Updates, User Experience

You may have noticed that your BatchBook account looks a lot different today!

While we have revamped features every now and then, we’ve never done a full design overhaul of BatchBook. Until now.

First, here’s how it looks:

(click the image to go to a slideshow on Flickr)

We’re not fans of redesign for the sake of redesign, and there were lots of goals for this change. Some of the driving factors:

• A lighter design. The previous design had a lot of boxes with thick borders and background colors. This was fine when we tended to have one main column and a couple sidebar items. But as BatchBook has matured, we have added more useful features. The pages were starting to get heavy and this certainly lightens them up.
• Better use of space. The boxes in the previous design had rounded corners with padding… and internal rounded corners with padding… and then some more padding. A lot of space was being allocated to… not much. Now everything has a lot more breathing room.
• Faster, faster! My favorite thing to point out about this redesign is that we deleted a whole lot more code than we added. As a result, BatchBook uses far less javascript and images, so it runs a lot faster.
• SuperCute Quick Add. With all of this space that we gained, I decided to take some of it and invest it in promoting a feature that didn’t get enough real estate last time. Instead of a skinny little dropdown menu, Quick Add has a click-reducing icon approach. Because our users are so smart, I tip my hat to forum user Kenny for inspiring this change.
• And more to come! Let’s just say this design is far more flexible, and that will allow us (and you!) to do more things with it. Stay tuned!

Just to touch on some other updates that happened over the past week or so:

• As mentioned on the blog already, you can now complete To-Dos from the Activity Log.
• The very same Live Search that we have for Contacts and Communications is also available for the To-Do List.
• A personal favorite, when you export contacts to vCard or CSV, each person’s contact info will be combined with her/his company contact data. So, when I export my own contact record, not only do I get my personal and work email addresses and phone numbers, I also get BatchBlue’s main phone line and fax number.
• Finally, when you export to CSV, you can choose to include a contact’s tags in that export.

We hope you like the new changes! And we have so much more up our sleeves…

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Tags: batchbook, design, small business CRM